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Devolver is okay with Steam's 30% cut

Devolver is okay with Steam's 30% cut

Indie publisher Devolver Digital has said that it is content with Valve's offering on Steam and that the company's 30 per cent revenue share has allowed it to be where it is today.

Speaking to GameSpot, co-founder Graeme Struthers said that the 70/30 split was more generous than anything else when Devolver first started out and that regular payments via the digital platform gave it a degree of stability. This echoes what Struthers told PCGamesInsider at Gamescom this year when we spoke to the company for its tenth birthday.

"To come out of a model [before Steam] where we were, as a games publisher, maybe making 25 percent, and that's if you were successful," Struthers said.

"To be in a 70/30 relationship, it was transformative in every sense," he said. "And that led to realignment with relationships with developers. If there is more money and it's more frequent, you can have better terms with developers."

Struthers said that he's pleased there's competition from the likes of Epic in the market, but the Fortnite maker still has a ways to come before it is truly on Valve's level.

"Competition is going to come along at some point. Epic have taken a view that their way of bringing content to their platform is far more generous revenue share and obviously they've been pushing exclusives--that's great," he said.

"And it's giving developers and publishers a choice. You can't compare the two things however as like for like. Steam has invested I don't know how many hundreds of millions of dollars in their platform; Epic have yet to do that. I'm not saying they won't, and hopefully they will. In terms of the features and in terms of the toolsets for developers, there's a ways to go. But competition is good."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.